Mihaela van der Schaar to give a talk at conference in West Africa

The van der Schaar Lab is delighted to announce that Prof. Mihaela van der Schaar will speak at the AI in Healthcare Conference West Africa, organised by the African Institute of Business and Technology.

Mihaela’s talk on ‘Transforming healthcare in Africa using machine learning’ will take place on 11 May from 15:00 to 16:15 BST (other time zones here).

Why is this conference significant?

The conference is one of the first of its kind on the African continent, with the goal of improving the delivery of healthcare across Africa; raising awareness of AI research and development; and facilitating collaboration between African and foreign scholars. According to the organisers, Western African countries are short on AI specialists, and growing exposure to the global AI and machine learning for healthcare community is critical to pushing the field forward.

The organisers take significant strides toward inspiring the next generation of African clinicians and researchers to engage with AI and machine learning by making the conference free for students and obtaining heavy hitters like Mihaela and her colleagues.

You can discover a list of speakers as well as information on how to register on their website:  https://afrikinstitute.org/, 

What will Mihaela be talking about?

Mihaela will highlight a number of important ideas, including:

• How automated machine learning can improve healthcare accessibility and resource utilisation (e.g., clinical risk scores, personalised treatment recommendations, personalised monitoring; more information about automated ML here).
• How machine learning interpretability can enable new discoveries and understanding (more information on interpretable ML here).
• How machine learning can augment human skills (more information on quantitative epistemology here).
• How transfer learning can reduce healthcare disparities arising from biomedical data inequality

Prof Smaïla Ouedraogo, former Burkina Faso Health Minister, will moderate the session with Mihaela, highlighting how important this kind of event is for the region.

What can we learn from this experience?

The van der Schaar lab is thoroughly inspired by the passion of the organisers and the potential impact of the event.

As a result, stay tuned for further information about an upcoming Inspiration Exchange session on how AI and machine learning might impact healthcare on the African continent. You can learn more about our engagement sessions and how to participate here!